I live in a small, rural village in Vermont. The town is about 45 square miles with a population of around 3,100, but the village is 0.6 square miles and houses about 80% of our population. I hear from friends who grew up in rural towns in the Midwest about how everyone is up in everyone else’s business, but this is Yankee New England, so while there are plenty of rumors and reputations, there are also a lot of people who don’t do a lot of talking and gossiping.
One place where the town does talk, however, is our Community & Neighborhood Watch group on Facebook. It’s a private Facebook group where local business owners can share announcements (“Don’t forget to stop by the store tonight when trick or treating!”), residents can post photos of eagles over the lake or osprey over the softball field, neighbors can ask if anyone has a specific tool they can borrow or extra garage space where they can store a motorcycle for the winter, and community members can share news stories that may be of interest to their fellow residents, shout out a town worker for doing a great job, or celebrate our town sports teams for winning games or championships ("Go Blue Devils!").
It’s also a Neighborhood Watch page. When someone steals merchandise from the sidewalk outside the hardware store or when a woman hits three different stores in town with shoplifting, the owners share security footage to see if anyone can make an ID. Periodically, some folks will break into a bunch of cars on different streets on different nights to steal spare change from cup holders and center consoles, and someone will remind everyone, once again, to lock their cars at night.
People also routinely share mug shots and police reports about arrests either made in town or of Poultney residents being arrested for doing illegal things in other towns.
And that brings us to something that happened this week.
As you know, the midterm elections take place this coming Tuesday, and one of the names on my town’s ballot is our incumbent state senator, Terry Williams. A loyal member of the Republican party, Mr. Williams has served as one of our state’s 30 senators since 2023. Born in Rutland, he graduated from my town’s high school. He served in the Vermont’s Army National Guard, became a commissioned armor officer in 1979, and retired in 2004 after a combat tour in Afghanistan. He has worked as an automotive technician and Vermont deputy game warden, and operates a local farm. He’s served on my town’s select board and our county’s regional planning committee, and is a member of several Veterans groups and gun-oriented groups, such as the NRA, Gun Owners of Vermont, Sportsmen’s Clubs.
In Montpelier, Mr. Williams serves on the Senate Education Committee and is the vice chair of Natural Resources and Energy Committee. In the 2025-2026 session, Mr. Williams sponsored or co-sponsored 70 bills, more than half of which were congratulatory or memorial resolutions, including two that cut across the the usual narrative of Republicans: in one joint-resolution, Mr. Williams supported transgender and nonbinary Vermonters and declared the state’s commitment to fighting discrimination, while in a senate resolution, he urged that all state agencies protect the personal and medical records of Vermonters who have been diagnosed with autism from being revealed to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s autism research database.
For the other bills, the ones that actually tried to do something, an analysis demonstrates that his agenda for 2025-2026 was systematically directed toward mitigating financial and regulatory burdens on rural Vermonters, curbing state-level environmental mandates, defending traditional conservative social principles, and advancing pragmatic infrastructure and tax relief solutions.
He focused significant legislative energy on contesting the Democratic supermajority’s climate and energy policies as Vice Chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. He structured his bills to repeal, roll-back, or constrain our state-level climate mandates, including the complete repeal of the Affordable Heat Act. At the same time, he advanced pragmatic, market-oriented environmental proposal, including increasing the maximum capacity size of solar net-metering projects and easing administrative bottlenecks for small-scale solar developers and redirecting climate funding toward weatherization workforce recruitment and direct thermal efficiency assistance.
As a farmer, Mr. Williams also focused on protecting our working landscape, strengthening legal protections against nuisance lawsuits and protecting agricultural operators against residential expansion in rural areas. He also worked to loosen Act 250’s development restrictions and establish models for compensating private landowners whose properties host public recreational trail networks.
For western and southern Vermonters, he cosponsored a bipartisan initiative to turn Vermont Route 22A into a limited-access highway that would connect Burlington, Vergennes, Middlebury, and Rutland directly to I-87 in New York.
Mr. Williams also directed a series of bills at public safety, criminal justice, and constitutional rights. As a member of the NRA and Gun Owners of Vermont, he sought to permit members of the General Assembly to carry concealed handguns within the State House. He co-sponsored a bill to overhaul procedures governing juvenile offenders and the establishment of a facility for criminal justice-involved individuals with severe mental health issues. He also fought to establish standalone criminal charges for acts of violence committed against an unborn child during the commission of a crime against a pregnant mother.
As a member of the Senate Committee on Education, he cosponsored the bipartisan bill aimed at establishing cell-phone-free school, authored a bill to establish statutory protections for parental authority regarding their children’s education, healthcare, and moral upbringing. In healthcare, he crossed the aisle to establish a licensure and regulatory framework for freestanding birth centers outside of traditional hospital settings and expanded the clinical scope of practice for licensed optometrists in an effort to improve rural access to eye care procedures.
Now, that is all plenty of information on which to base one’s vote, whether you decide to vote for or against him. Were I to wrap this up right now and share it in the Neighborhood Watch Facebook group, I’m confident the administrator of the group, a local man who moderates the group on his own free time, would have no problem allowing it to be published.
But what I have yet to mention is that earlier this week, Mr. Williams was arrested by the Vermont State Police for domestic assault. Seven Days reported:
According to a police affidavit, Williams’ 47-year-old daughter told a state trooper that her father had hit her in the face with an open hand on Monday night during an argument about a ‘moldy bale of hay.’ Williams’ daughter...told police that her father called her ‘a miserable woman’ and said he ‘should have punched you 40 years ago.’ She told police that she believed her father had been drinking at the time of the alleged assault... Williams’ daughter, who had been living with her father, told police that this was the first time her father had physically assaulted her.
According to the affidavit, Williams confirmed to police that he had argued with his daughter ‘about pallets in the horse barn’ and other issues. Williams said he put his left hand up after his daughter moved toward him and inadvertently made contact with her face. Williams said his finger had been injured during the interaction, and an officer observed that it was swollen.
Should Williams be convicted, he faces a prison sentence of up to 18 months and a fine of $5,000.
Unfortunately, when I tried to share a similar news article to the Neighborhood Watch group earlier this week, the moderator of the group did not approve it, and he removed a similar article that had snuck through before he could catch it. He also removed comments on earlier articles that highlighted a domestic assault charge against the person named and the charge against Mr. Williams, articles the moderator had no problem allowing back when they first appeared.
The difference is that the moderator is a close, personal friend of Mr. Williams, even appearing in a news photo sitting directly behind Mr. Williams in the courthouse after the arrest.
Now, the Facebook group is a private group that the administrator runs on his own time. He receives no compensation for his work, and I’m sure he receives more grief (like this blog post) than gratitude for the time he volunteers to the community.
But time on task is not equivalent to always doing a good job.
Mr. Williams is an elected representative of our community. His arrest on domestic assault charges is not only newsworthy, but it deserves further discussion. All of my interactions with Mr. Williams have been positive. Outside of just seeing him around, I invited him to my classroom to share with my students how things work in Montpelier and to discuss with my fellow teachers what he was hearing and doing as a member of the Education committee and what he could be doing as a representative for our school. He listened well, spoke authentically, and admitted when he did not know something or was out of his depth.
As a bona-fide communist sympathizer, my politics don’t align well with Mr. Williams’s, but I did have the sense he served our town honorably.
Should his arrest for domestic assault and what appears to be his support for violence against women and children (“I should have hit [my daughter] 40 years ago [when she was seven years old]”) determine whether I vote for him?
Should it determine whether I actively campaign against him, using conversations in the Facebook group to persuade my neighbors against voting for a man who many of them consider, if not a friend, at least a fine and honorable man?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I do know the administrator of the town’s digital town square should not censor those conversations from taking place.